Ebola patient heading to Neb.

A U.S. missionary physician who contracted Ebola in Liberia is being flown to Nebraska for treatment.

Bruce Johnson, the president of the North Carolina-based missionary group SIM USA, said Thursday that Rick Sacra is being flown to Omaha and will be treated in the Nebraska Medical Center’s Biocontainment Patient Care Unit. He will probably arrive Friday.

Johnson said transporting the physician “took an exceptional effort across many organizations,” and he thanked the State Department for an unspecified role.

Two other American health missionaries who became ill while treating Ebola patients in West Africa were given the experimental drug ZMapp and later recovered. Both were evacuated from West Africa and treated at a special isolation unit at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, and they have been released. There is no more ZMapp available, though, and much still needs to be learned about its role in their recovery and how it could be used in an outbreak.

Sacra, a doctor from the Boston area, opted to head to Liberia after hearing that two other missionaries were sick. He was infected by the virus that has killed about 1,900 people and infected more than 3,000. But Sacra, who has worked in Africa as a medical missionary since 1995 and divides his time between Massachusetts and Liberia, was working in an obstetrics unit, not the special Ebola section of the hospital. It is not yet clear how he contracted Ebola.